 Awesome. So we're at the top of the hour, so we will get going. First off, I want to say hello and welcome everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. We appreciate you tuning in and we're excited to have you on. In this webcast, we'll be covering a hot topic on how to improve your remote fluency as a team leader and how to thrive as a remote worker. My name is Darren. I'm the head of remote here at GitLab and I'm joining you from North Carolina today. We'd love to hear where everyone else is joining us from. So please use the chat function to say hi and tell us where you're located in the world. Before we get started, I'm going to cover a couple of housekeeping items. First, feel free to ask questions throughout the presentation. You can use the Q&A function at the bottom of the screen. And we'll have dedicated time for questions at the end of the webcast. But please feel free to send those in as you think of them and we'll make sure that we allow time for them at the end. If you have any technical difficulties, you can use the chat function to get in touch with our moderator. And lastly, we are recording today's presentation and that will be delivered to all registrants in the next few days. So with that, I want to welcome our presenter today, David Sakamoto, the Vice President of Customer Success here at GitLab. Welcome, David. Hey, thanks, Darren. I'm excited and we appreciate the opportunity to connect with the community on this really, really important topic given our new role and what's going on in our environment. Absolutely, man. This is one of my favorite topics, so I'm excited to dive in and learn from your insights. So I want to start with culture. I want to ask you what mindset and culture changes are needed to thrive as a remote team. And the reason I want to start with culture is I think it's one of the more underrated elements of getting remote right. People instinctively jump to what tools do we need? What software do we need? But before you get to all of that, I feel like there's a mindset shift and a cultural understanding that you need to wrap your head around. So I'd love for you to dig in and unpack some of that for our audience. Yeah, thanks, Darren. And I think of, when I think of mindset and culture, I think of three things. And the first is leading with empathy. And I think we've all gone through a dramatic change in every company is at a different stage and every individual is at a different stage, whether you've got a family or homeschooling or you're by yourself in your apartment or maybe you have an elderly person that lives with you. So we got to appreciate the impact of people's personal lives. That's the first and the second is the mindset change around. I think a lot of people are looking at this like, oh, I have to do this thing, had all these big challenges. But if you flip it, think of the opportunity that you have in front of you. Think of the opportunity to evolve the way that you do your work, how you collaborate. Are you driving the best practices from a business perspective and really give the take advantage? Think of the benefits you get from flexibility, efficiency, productivity. And for a business perspective, it gives you a lot of advantage from a hiring flexibility and cost and productivity as well. But yes, specifically about culture and values. And I think this one is, you know, everybody can read the tips on the workspace and other things. This is the one I think is probably the most important, right? And I think of our lab values. I think of really important things around transparency. I think of collaboration. I think of efficiency. I think of results. And if you start looking at the opportunity to rethink and the benefit you get from remote leveraging those values, you can really see significant changes, right? And kind of we use handbook first or document everything. And, you know, a couple of things, results. I know a lot of people have concerns like, how do I measure what people are doing? I can't see them sitting in their seats. Well, you've documented it. It's documented in an OCR or a goal. It's documented in your one-on-ones. It's documented in your meetings. So it allows that to really have visibility documented results. If you're documenting, you can also give you a transparent if you're making that information. Your information is accessible. It's transparent. It levels the playing field, right? You know, you don't have to be in the coffee room to get that special information because it's documented for everybody to consume. It also gives you a lot of flexibility for how people want to engage. Like in certain ways, you can actually promote diversity and inclusion by giving lots of different methods for people to share and contribute. And then obviously there's all the efficiency of doing things asynchronous. So again, that transparency, collaboration results, you know, you can leverage these as your foundation to drive the right practice and behavior of your team. And a key theme there was around documentation. And at GitLab, we try to work handbook first. We make sure that the handbook is our single source of truth. We want to make sure that people don't just document in their own way and then different teams don't have access to that. And you touched on transparency and the importance of that. When you have people spread out all over the world and you can't just tap someone on the shoulder or call an ad hoc meeting to get everyone on the same page, you have to make sure that people are looking to the same place to find one information they need. And although there is some process with that, it's very much a cultural and mindset shift. And I know one of our token examples of how GitLab does this and it's an easy thing to implement everywhere is how we do meetings and how we attach a Google doc agenda to every meeting invite and then all of the positive things that come from that. So do you want to give the audience a breakdown on that, something they can implement tomorrow to improve their meeting hygiene? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think if I gave the one actionable takeaway is meeting docs. And it's part of the way we operate every, aside from a coffee chat. So I think there, maybe we'll talk about making balancing between structured and unstructured or personal connection and actually business, but every business related meeting has a meeting doc. And in that meeting doc has a set agenda and we even have a format ahead of structure that and that's in our handbook. So I'm sure we'll show that afterwards, but you have a structured doc that's in there. I think the one really important thing is there doesn't need to be a single person that's responsible for documenting the project manager or the blah, blah, blah, right? It's everybody's job. So as someone else is talking, you go in, there's a format, you write the person's initials with their name and the comment with their stating. So it allows you to get at the end of oftentimes you finish the meeting and everybody's documenting as multiple people will chime in and kind of help out. And at the end, you actually have like a deliverable. You have an artifact, especially if you think of people asynchronous, people in different time zones that couldn't participate. Now you've got everything documented in the decision criteria where some of the points were in ultimately the ultimate decision. So it's right there. Again, tapping on that, you can manage results that way. You can provide transparent information since a lot of really good benefits. So I would highly suggest if there's one thing you take away and that's simple to implement, as Darren said, and we use Google Docs and there's lots of different tools to use, but start looking into using meeting docs and certainly blending those in your meetings today. Yeah, my takeaway there is this is one small step towards becoming a lot more intentional about how you run your business. And of course, it requires some of those forcing functions to do remote well and then you end up with efficiency benefits, even if you do transition back to the office post pandemic. This makes your meetings more efficient no matter where you are in the world. And that intentionality, I feel like is woven into the values where we are very conscious of every work element that we have and we try to optimize that for the broadest amount of people with ultimate transparency. And we were talking before about management has to be supportive of things that you wouldn't necessarily think, things like the dog barking when FedEx shows up. So give us some insights on the real life of working remotely and what it takes from management to be supportive of that, knowing that everyone is in a different workspace each day. Yeah, and I think if I certainly manage has to support it and role model it. And I think of different things of scenarios and I'll use the tactical example like video on. I think it's really important to have video on. You have better communication, you get better body language, but things you can turn be up through and off. Oh, you know what? I'm putting my mute, I like, my kids are gonna run around. That's okay. In fact, that's awesome. If they wanna come say hello, haven't come say hello, like let's like, again, flipping that mind and taking advantage of the remote and getting to know, oh, great, but we've had kids jump on and they're showing each other the Lego. So it's kind of, you know, being acceptance that if you think of well-being and not burning out, like I tell my team, hey, if you find time, put time in your schedule and make sure you're getting exercise or doing other things. And if, by the way, you finish a run and you just jump into the meeting and you're wearing a workout, that's awesome. I'm super stoked that you're making sure that you're having a balanced life and you're taking care of your physical health. So I think that there's a lot of acceptance of that and role modeling and making sure, is your management team acceptance of flexible time or acceptance of, or being acceptance of like, hey, something just came up, like I have a little meltdown happening at homeschooling. I need to step away, right? Or, I am getting burned out. I need to take some time off. So I think it's really, again, when I talked about leading with empathy, it's role modeling and how you practice and how you shape decisions and what guidance and actually what you do as a leader because that's gonna be the most important. You talked about leading by example and I think that's really important on the leadership front and I actually wanna take this moment to remind the audience that if you miss anything here, everything that we do regarding remote is documented in the Public Get Lab Handbook. If you go to allremote.info, you can download the remote playbook and listen to all of the guides of which David is referencing. So I actually wanna segue into leading by example and how that looks when you're thinking of structuring your day. You have a lot of people now that have become suddenly remote. They're transitioning into a remote workflow for the first time. What should they concern themselves with when they're thinking about structuring their day and how does communication play into it? We've all heard that if you're going remote, be sure to over-communicate but that can mean different things to different people. Yeah, and I think to me, I'll go after I think what I've actually heard, you know, like I have Zoom burn out. Like I'm just constantly on Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom, Zoom. You can't get your work done or it's just exhausting. Yes, yes, right? And so I think to some extent, you know, your efficiency of getting hyper-efficient and that has a consequence, right? Because there's definitely that efficiency and the way that I do is just make sure you're scheduling breaks of time. So there's a couple of things to do. Make sure you're scheduling breaks of time just to get up and go walk around, go outside, go have lunch away from your desk, creating a little bit of that separation from your work and your personal life. So schedule those breaks. The second thing, create those moments where you can create those water cooler moments, right? So create an opportunity where you can connect with somebody just personally. We have coffee chats. So again, there's no doc for that. It's literally just us. Hey, Darren and I just did one recently. Hey, just connect and see how things are going and you know, the personal life and interest and those kinds of things. So create those opportunities where you have the hours and group lunches. Get creative. Again, this is one of those things where take advantage, try out a lot of different things. And so I'm gonna work some out, but I think it's fun to just try them out. I'd say the third piece is give yourself some diversity. If you have the opportunity, maybe you have a porch or maybe you have a patio. Or maybe if you're lucky, you have a backyard. Try to give yourself a little diversity. Again, take advantage of the opportunity that you can move around and enjoy the nice day, especially as we're moving into spring. And be really intentional around your working time and kind of when you're gonna give yourself breaks so you can have the right. So you can avoid that burnout. Also just avoid, you know, give yourself time to get things done like email. Yeah, I've actually have a recommendation for those that are transitioning into remote and they're used to having a commute. And they're trying to figure out what does a day look like? I feel like my days have become blurred. I just sleep and work and sleep and work and there's no in between. If you're used to having a commute, I would recommend booking that time that you used to spend in the commute on your calendar and replace it with something else, whether that's resting or cooking or cleaning or any of the tips that David shared. And I think if you have that on your calendar to book into your day, it helps you to ramp into your day and very deliberately ramp out of your day and it puts some structure around the day. Because otherwise, if you don't physically walk out of a door in an office, you may ask how will I ever know if work is done? Because at home, the laptop is always around, so in theory, you could just work all the time. And you have to really be intentional about not doing that. And especially as leaders, I think you need to go the extra mile and in one-on-ones and interaction points, make sure that your directs actually know that they should be doing this and taking care of themselves and that the expectation isn't to just be on all the time. You mentioned earlier about worrying over productivity and it's funny because I've actually seen the opposite, where you need to worry about your team burning themselves out and working too much. So be cognizant of that as leadership. I also want to ask you a question on workspace. You've mentioned the separation and creating a structure around your day, but surely some of that has to do with workspace. And I feel like people that have come from the office where they have this cubicle that's nicely set up by someone that understands ergonomics and then suddenly they're thrust into their home and everyone's home looks different. Some have a bonus room, some don't. Some people have an external monitor, some don't. What tips and tricks on the workspace front and what would you recommend to leaders if they're considering a stipend or a budget to equip people with things like extra monitors or ergonomic gear? Yeah, that's a great question. And I love how you commented a little bit about going back to that management supporting this. I think it's important to understand people may not have a standing desk or even like a desk even to work at. If you're in a kitchen table, I've seen people like that's my workspace and now my back and shoulders may have problems. So I think of probably three key things. One is your environment. One, make sure you just have a comfortable space. I appreciate not everybody has a separate room that you can have an office. So wherever you have it, think of just ergonomics. I've seen people who use books and stack things up to get the right ergonomics. There's add-on desk that you can get. Or if you're able, you can actually get a standing desk. But there's lots of options that are of varying cost that'll get you, but just make sure you're comfortable. A comfortable desk is comfortable with a chair, basic lighting, and you've got a webcam. Most laptops have them. If you can get one, I also suggest if you can get one to put one up good positioning versus kind of looking up. But that's more of a pro tip. As long as you have a camera, that's a good place to start. You don't need to get it perfect. So ergonomics, like make sure you're comfortable working for the duration of time. And put the brakes in so you can walk around. The second is privacy. So if you have a separate room, that's great. And I've seen people use the tricks of like something on the door handle, like, hey, working, not working. Even if you're in an open space, you can have like a physical sign. It could be a sign, it could be a plant, like when there's plants up that I'm working, some kind of notification to everybody else. I also appreciate a lot of people may not have a separate room. Again, so if you can get some sort of noise, canceling headphones or something that allows you to focus and clearly communicate with your team members, that's always helpful. So, you know, creating that sense of privacy with the space that you have. And then the third is probably the most important, I think, again, tying back to that burnout and drain is try to create like boundaries for yourself. Work has started, work has ended. Similar to like when you get dressed, right? You wear sweatpants. I personally like to get dressed like I'm going to work, right? So I have that work is starting and then work is ending. I have a process personally where I'm done. I like to clean up my desk and put my laptop away, right? Especially if you're in, if you're maybe work spaces in your bedroom, right? You don't want to be waking up looking at work constantly. So as much as you can kind of create a boundary that disables your laptops put away. So now you're living your personal life. So it's figure out whether they're physical, mental process things around creating that separation. Again, that's like ergonomics and the privacy and create that separation of your work and work life and personal life. Love the tips, David. I want to pivot over to a question we've got from the audience. And this is from a leader that is now having to think about hiring, recruiting and onboarding in a remote world. And for leaders that have never hired someone purely remotely, this can be jarring. A lot of times the initial screener calls will happen on the phone or on zoom, but then there's always an in-person moment somewhere along the way. And one thing that I wanted to point out is get lab is unique in that all of our hires are done purely virtually. There is never a necessary in-person moment. So what would you recommend there on kind of breaking down the fear of preconceived notions around hiring, hiring remotely and building that rapport and those relationships through virtual means? Yeah. And it's kind of the earlier comment how it's not dramatically different. You have to just get over the mental hurdle or you're not going to be in the same room and shake hands, right? Or you know, whatever you had in the in-person. When I was hired, I was like, wow, this is kind of strange. But then I've hired a bunch of people and I'm like, it's actually worked out great. So there's a little bit, it's like, it's fun, right? And ultimately I think of it's kind of my earlier point of think of the opportunity to just make sure you're having best practices because ultimately remote hiring best practices is the same, right? Do I've got a set? Do I did my thoughtful around who's on the interview panel? Do I have it well identified? Who's going to test for what items? Do I have a scorecard that you document against specific characteristics that you're measuring of skills, experience of values, and it's documented so you can roll it up and you can actually see all the results. So in many ways, if you think of just how do we get better, like look at your just core hiring practices and you know, make sure that you're following those. And ultimately I think you're going to find that a lot of the, it is a lot of fun around that because you can, I've hired lots of people with all remote and never met them in person and they've worked out fantastic. And you know, our team specifically has a very low attrition rate as well. So, you know, it certainly can be done. It's just best practices for hiring. But Darren, if you have any other suggestions, a little bit of those as well. Yeah. Well, one thing you mentioned on looking for values and documenting the values fit, I really wanted to dive in there because one of the counterpoints I've heard from leaders is, I don't know how to assess culture fit remotely. And it's interesting because at GitLab, we specifically say that we don't hire for culture fit. We hire for values fit. We want people to fit our values so that then they can contribute and add to the culture that we have. So we, we look for values first because if they fit the values, then they can bolster our culture. And this is sort of a mental shift when it comes to hiring, because a lot of times people want that in person moment, because there's just some subjectivity there on, I generally just like the vibe of this person. And so if you hire for values, it's more intentional and it's better for your long-term goals as a company. You want somebody to match the values and then they can add to the culture. I actually want to flip this on the other side. You said you've been hired remotely. What tips do you have for those that are now interviewing remotely and they're looking for roles and they're going through the process on the other side and they're having to do the interviewing remotely. Yeah. Great question. You know, a couple of things and it's funny. There's going to be a lot of alignment we talked about before. But first make sure your environment is clean, right? As clean as possible, right? So when you're interviewing, as I'm interviewing people, I want to focus on the interviewer. I mean interview, the person being interviewed, the candidate. And try to remove all distractions, right? From, you know, visual clutter, noise, everything. That allows us to have the best conversation and most focus. So I think a lot of times like focusing your environment, you know, focus on your camera. Like make sure like physically you're, you know, you want to be presented. You want to make sure you're clear. You're centered in the camp, you know, camera. You're not like kind of off in the bottom or something like that. So make sure that they, you know, your communication can be clearly seen as well as heard. So I think the visual aspect then includes the environment. Then there's just the essentials around being prepared and being set. But I think a lot of it is making sure that your presentation on the video is really, is, is clear. I think that's fundamentally the key difference. Beyond that, it's about just interview practice. Like be prepared, you know, understand the role, understand what their lens may be and prep for the specific questions that you expect. We had another question come in around building relationships. And I think for people that are used to having informal communications happen at the office, there's that typical water cooler or the coffee lobby. The immediate question is, well, how do we replicate that? Should we replicate that? And how much of our social quota should be, we be filling on work relationships. So what tips do you have to share there? And if you have any anecdotes on how get lab does this, you mentioned coffee chats. We have a whole slew of things that we put intentionality around to make sure that people feel like they're really connected with their teammates. Yeah. So, you know, absolutely it needs to be, you know, structured and built, you know, into your day. In terms of some specific things, you know, because so first, I think the first question is, it's as important in remote as it is when you're in the office. And in some ways, if you kind of lead with empathy, if you understand the situation, it's actually even more important now, given the dramatic change that we're seeing in our lives. So it's some extent it's even higher now and somewhat independent of remote. So some of the things that we do coffee chats are mentioned. So there's no specific agenda. Typically 25 minutes give you time to break five minutes between the next meeting. And just really just there to connect for anything personal, you know, sometimes work stuff comes into it. That's okay, but it's literally a coffee chat. Like you run into someone in a break room and our culture. So again, kind of moral modding. Anybody can schedule it, you know, coffee chat with anybody else, right? There's no rules around it. So that's probably our first, you know, recommended one, but we've also tried a bunch of things. People just put a block of time and invite the whole team and people jump in and out, you know, different time zones. You know, I've seen lots of people. I think most of you have happy hours. I've even started trying scheduling a Peloton, you know, time now that they have this hashtag. So you can actually virtually ride together. I've, we've created a shared calendar for working out health and wellness and people are putting yoga classes on there. And you can just jump in and do a yoga class together. So in some ways, like these are ideas, but hopefully, you know, you can take advantage of it. Like what are different ideas that you can come up with, get creative and try some different things. Yeah, I love that. And another thing that we've started with so many parents having kids at home is this idea around the juice box chat where we have parents sync up their schedules and if they have open blocks in their calendar, they can just turn their zoom cameras on and let their kids come and dear the zoom space and they can sing together, play together, dance together, speak different languages together. And so we have kids joining across oceans, which I think is really awesome because on the surface it looks like everyone's isolated, but when you use technology to the fullest extent, we're actually bringing people together in a new and innovative way. And this isn't something that's super difficult. I get lab. We just started as an idea and slack and created a shared calendar and we were off to the races. And I guess it goes back to your earlier point on the scarcity versus abundance mindset. If you try to have the abundance mindset and think, well, we're here, what are all the things at our disposal? What can we do now that we could not do before? And it gets you in a better mental state. And I think it's vital as leadership to take that approach because people by default are going to feel isolated and a little bit down right now and you have the opportunity to bring people up and unlock opportunities that weren't there before. Totally. So I want to close with one final question that came in. What management strategy, hiring or training challenge do you wish you knew about before becoming remote? Great question. So I came from a very highly hybrid remote company before as well as at Cisco before. My team was about 60% remote and 40% in offices. And to me coming to get lab like, oh, 60, 40, 100% the same same. It's not like it's fundamentally better. Right. I think in the hybrid environment, like you, and I didn't realize it until I experienced it. And we talked about some of the values and culture around inclusion, some of this, every single level playing field, right? So it's not, you don't have this first class citizen being the ones in the office that get the special information because they can go about drop by the office and they're in the coffee chat, they get special information and more attention. So I think it's like, you know, every single level playing field. So I, you know, I think of really, it's kind of that. Wow. There's a lot of different opportunities for us to be more transparent and inclusive. And some of those pieces. So again, I think it old me goes back to that theme of, you know, I appreciate there are challenges in shift, making the shift, but change that mindset or thinking about the opportunities you have that you can do. Like the example of the juice box. What we're going to do here is change that mindset. So I think it's really important to talk about some of those things. And actually have been pages both from a business and personal perspective. Love that, David. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thanks so much for the tips and insights and for the audience watching. Thank you very much for joining us. Be sure to follow get lab on Twitter and LinkedIn and we'll be following up with a recording of this webcast in a few days. So look out for it and be sure to register for the next one.